Users take more photographs, audio, and video with digital cameras and camcorders (as well as cell phones) now than ever before. In the past, the primary disadvantage to acquiring large amounts of digital content was a lack of inexpensive storage devices available, particularly if a user acquired the content in a high resolution format. Advances in storage technology have resulted in greater amounts of storage being sold at a lower cost, such that it is now possible to purchase many gigabits of storage for a few hundred dollars, sometimes less. Now, the opposite situation has emerged, where most users of digital devices have so much acquired content, it is hard for them to easily organize and make sense of it all.
A number of software applications are available that allow a user to preview and navigate their digital content wherever that content may be stored, and then edit it, share it, and produce the content in a variety of ways. Even operating systems, such as the Microsoft® Windows® family of operating systems, include an automatic preview of a folder containing digital images by providing thumbnails of some of the images contained within a folder. Other applications may create previews in their own particular ways, such as showing a number of condensed-sized thumbnails of digital images, a short clip of a longer video file, or a short clip of a longer audio file.
Operating systems, such as Microsoft® Vista®, as well as digital content acquisition applications that come bundled with a digital camera/camcorder, such as Olympus® X®, or is freely available, such as Picasa® by Google®, allow a user to identify elements of digital content when a user downloads that content from a source (i.e., a digital camera, camera phone, digital camcorder or other video recorder, memory device located in a digital device, and so on) to a computer. This is a manual process that involves the user typing, or otherwise providing, the descriptive information to the application. These applications thus allow a user to preview and search through digital content. Some information about the digital content may be produced by the capturing device itself, and is then acquired by the application. For example, a digital camera may encode, within a digital image captured by the camera, the type of camera used to capture the image, as well as the time and date on which the image was captured, the size of the image in bytes, the settings used by the camera when capturing the image, and so on.